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Automated charlatans

Now come socialbots. These automated charlatans are programmed to tweet and retweet. They have quirks, life histories and the gift of gab. Many of them have built-in databases of current events, so they can piece together phrases that seem relevant to their target audience. They have sleep-wake cycles so their fakery is more convincing, making them less prone to repetitive patterns that flag them as mere programs. Some have even been souped up by so-called persona management software, which makes them seem more real by adding matching Facebook, Reddit or Foursquare accounts, giving them an online footprint over time as they amass friends and like-minded followers.

Researchers say this new breed of bots is being designed not just with greater sophistication but also with grander goals: to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people and one another.

Dating sites provide especially fertile ground for socialbots. Swindlers routinely seek to dupe lonely people into sending money to fictitious suitors or to lure viewers toward pay-for-service pornography pages. Christian Rudder, a co-founder and general manager of OkCupid, said that when his dating site recently bought and redesigned a smaller site, they witnessed not just a sharp decline in bots, but also a sudden 15 percent drop in use of the new site by real people. This decrease in traffic occurred, he maintains, because the flirtatious messages and automated "likes" that bots had been posting to members' pages had imbued the former site with a false sense of intimacy and activity. "Love was in the air," Mr. Rudder said. "Robot love."

Mr. Rudder added that his programmers are seeking to design their own bots that will flirt with invader bots, courting them into a special room, "a purgatory of sorts," to talk to one another rather than fooling the humans.

Marketers and political groups are in on the game, too. Last year, researchers at the Health Media Collaboratory of the University of Illinois at Chicago found that e-cigarettes were being heavily marketed on social media largely through bots dispersing messages about weaning people from regular cigarettes.

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